It’s Getting Hot In Here

This essay wraps up and brings together a series of reflections on tropical deforestation issues which I published while writing from Iquitos, Peru, earlier this summer (you can see those shorter pieces here, here, and here).  I know it’s long for a blog post, but to those concerned about the fate of tropical forests I hope it will be interesting.  This issue is way too complex and multi-faceted for the essay to be much shorter!

What it REALLY Will Take to “Save the Rainforests”

On July 8th of this year, a friend and I were returning to our cheap hotel in the city of Iquitos, Peru, when our hired moto-taxi (a sort of cross between a taxi cab and a motorcycle) came to a halt in front of a blocked-off street. The street, though closed to motorized traffic, was filled with people moving in one long stream. We heard shouts and excited talking, and soon learned from out taxi driver that it was a major street protest which had blocked off the road.

We were, by this time, close to our hotel anyway—so my friend and I hurriedly thanked the taxi driver, and went to investigate the protest. We followed the parade for quite some time down the streets of Iquitos; though the marchers were flanked by police, the law enforcement didn’t seem particularly on edge, and everyone appeared in good spirits. People came out of shops that lined the street to watch the marchers go by, and a few marching parents pushed strollers with young children in front of them. It seemed to be a speak-out-for-whatever-you-want-to sort of event, and there were contingents of the parade focused on labor rights, education, and indigenous land-rights. Toward the back was a group waving flags in support of Ollanta Humala—a left-wing candidate for Peru’s 2011 presidential elections. What the protesters seemed to have in common was a frustration with the current administration of President Alan Garcia, and with a variety of government policies that have shifted Peru closer and closer to the capitalist ideal of free reign for corporations with little respect for community needs.

I begin this essay with the recent protest in Iquitos because it presents an image starkly at odds with the traditional view of rainforest protection in the developing world. No one in the parade, at least that I saw, was holding signs that mentioned biodiversity or carbon sequestration specifically. And yet, for reasons I’ll get to soon, I think it is actions like this one that have more potential than anything else to secure a safe future for our planet’s species-rich and climate-stabilizing rainforests.

Halting deforestation in the tropics must be an essential piece of the puzzle if we are truly to avert a climate catastrophe. Greenpeace reports that“Tropical deforestation is responsible for about 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions – more than all the cars, trucks, planes, boats, and trains in the world combined.” And yet, the story about deforestation that many of us have heard since childhood is a fundamentally flawed one which, unfortunately, the general public still accepts. According to this traditional view, rainforests are coming down because of exploding population growth in the developing world, and the inability of local people to manage their resources properly. It’s a view that has led to a rainforest movement which, in both industrialized and developing nations, has tended to focus on buying up large parcels of land for “protection” from the locals, and researching new farming methods that will presumably be taught to and enlighten local people, so they stop tearing up their forest quite so much. The holy grail of the traditional rainforest movement is a pristine rainforest reserve, completely protected from local people, perhaps frequented only by a few “ecotourists” who come ready to appreciate the natural splendors of the forest.

If my sarcasm hasn’t come through already, let me make it clear that my own views are contrary to this traditional outlook. I resonate much more strongly with the view laid out by Professors John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto of the University of Michigan, in their book Breakfast of Biodiversity (second edition published 2005). “[P]easant farming activity,” write these authors, “while directly responsible for much deforestation, is itself a consequence of something else” (Vandermeer and Perfecto 170). This overarching cause, according to Vandermeer and Perfecto, can be attributed to a “web of causality” which encompasses everything from international markets, to World Bank and IMF policies, to engineered “uprisings” funded by the US to put trade-friendly leaders in power in the developing world.

Sometimes, policies with no immediately obvious connection to rainforests turn out to be an essential part of the puzzle. For instance, a major factor contributing to a decline in deforestation rates in Costa Rica between 1995 and 2005 was that country’s “remarkably progressive social security network,” which has allowed landless peasant farmers in Costa Rica to petition for title to the lands they occupy, establish schools with government aid, and band together to build secure communities with government sanction (Vandermeer and Perfecto 127). Farmers with title to farmable land of their own do not need to move continually deeper and deeper into the forest, clearing land as they go. Thus, land-rights laws and policies that protect a community’s right to organize can be as important to preserving rainforest and more traditional conservation goals; a pattern that became more than evident to me during my time in Peru.

Iquitos, the largest city in the Peruvian Amazon, is growing ever-larger. While in Iquitos I visited areas which, according to local people, had been covered in rainforest ten years ago. Now these places on the outskirts of the city have been transformed into densely populated slum-like communities eating away at the boundaries of the forest. Some might seize on this example as proof that expanding populations and a high peasant birth rate really is the main threat to forests in Peru. Yet there’s one problem with that logic: the outward expansion of Iquitos appears to be due less to high birth rates than to migration. The Iquitos slums are filling up with former farmers, many of them young people, who are leaving the small forest villages that dot the Amazon’s rivers, and coming to the city to look for work. Needless to say, many of these people are disappointed in their hopes for prosperity, and end up eking out a living in the slums.

It is impossible to say with certainty what motivates most people to move to the city to look for work. However, a glance at Peru’s political landscape provides some clues. Land rights for people in Peru’s forest villages is hardly a priority for Alan Garcia’s administration and, indeed, the Peruvian government’s main interest in the forest seems to hinge on the Amazon’s use to the extractive industries, particularly oil and gas. People in the Iquitos area acutely aware of this. “Alan, la selva no se vende,” reads one of many politically worded graffiti messages scrawled on the walls of Iquitos buildings: Alan, don’t sell the forest.

My limited experience in Peru could not allow me to make a definite claim that people are moving into the Iquitos slums because their land is being sold off to oil companies. Indeed, the truth is unlikely to be so simple; most people migrating to Iquitos are probably from areas of forest close to the city, where the tourism industry and other factors are likely to preclude oil development. Yet I believe there is a connection between the Peruvian government’s disregard for traditional lands, and migration patterns that lead to deforestation. The slogan of a new, reality-based rainforest movement might be that “Farmers don’t kill rainforests: displaced farmers kill rainforests.” And the past several decades have seen traditional agriculturists displaced by neo-liberalization in virtually every country in Latin America, with devastating results for natural ecosystems and human communities. International economic policies that measure a country’s prosperity by its GDP, and which foster the conversion of community commons into corporate property have continually left a country’s poorest citizens more destitute than before. These people may become landless peasants cutting further and further into the forests of Costa Rica; or they may become slum-dwellers in the expanding margins of Iquitos.

So what is to be done? Just as there is no “silver bullet” for the climate crisis, no single step is going to save the world’s rainforests. Yet a variety of policies are clearly worth pursuing. The most effective strategies will be those that address the underlying causes behind deforestation: a complex of “free trade” and other neo-liberal economic policies which not only have a significant impact on forests themselves, but often make carving away at remnants of rainforest the only option for poor farmers in the tropics.

A first step might be a boycott of or organized resistance to companies engaging in destructive behavior in the tropics. Many non-profits, including Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network, are already working successfully on projects of this type. To be sure, some will argue that boycotting a particular company does not get at the real root of the neo-liberal machine. This is probably true, but I firmly believe such actions are important nevertheless. A single policy decision by a major corporation can have huge and immediate implications for endangered ecosystems, and can buy us a little time as we fight to more completely replace the neo-liberal economy.

To get closer to the root of the problem, protest the institutions and political decisions that facilitate neo-liberal ideology. These include the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as various “free trade” agreements. The US currently has such agreements with Mexico, most of Central America, and Peru, and will almost certainly seek more with other Latin American countries in coming years. Both Democratic and Republican legislators need to hear from their constituents that these agreements perpetuate a cycle of social unrest and environmental destruction. Promotion of neo-liberal policy, however, goes far deeper than trade agreements, and efforts that seek to localize regional economies and decrease dependence on imported materials can have effects that extend all the way to the tropics. In my own region, the Pacific Northwest, the fight against importing Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is one of the starkest examples of resistance to neo-liberalism in action. Gas used in the western US now comes almost completely from domestic and Canadian sources; opening the Northwest up to imported LNG would tie us to a global market that extracts gas in developing countries for export to the industrialized world.

As with any mass movement (and a mass movement is what we need here), there are many roles to be filled. If organizing boycotts and lobbying political figures it what floats your boat, then go for it. If this doesn’t feel like enough, there’s always banner-dropping on corporate buildings, or getting arrested in an act of civil disobedience against LNG. In the end, anything that contributes to the localization of economies, the empowerment of civil society over corporate entities, and the global social justice movement is likely to have a positive impact on the fate of the world’s rainforests. Interestingly, these are the same measures which have the best chance of successfully beating back the fossil fuel industries. The economic powers destroying the rainforests may eventually be toppled by the same forces which dethrone Big Oil and King Coal.

From the sidewalk, that day of the protest in Iquitos, I watched a throng of people stream past me, representing groups that work for everything from labor rights to indigenous land issues. In the forest of messages displayed on signs and banners, none clearly encapsulated the dream of the old rainforest movement, which sees a pristine reserve protected from an encroaching human birth rate as the pinnacle of conservation in the tropics. Yet what I saw in Iquitos was something far bigger than that old dream: a movement for social justice that could span international boundaries and contribute to a future where people matter more than corporate entities, and the well-being of country is no longer measured by its GDP. And that could really save the rainforests.

Book Citation

Vandermeer and Perfecto.  Breakfast of Biodiversity. Food First Books: Oakland, CA, 2005